Consider Sex-Role as the Cure, Rather Than the Problem: Diane Ehrensaft’s Eugenics Solution

May 27, 2015

The following was written by Diane Ehrensaft, Director of Mental Health at the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at University of California, San Francisco. Ehrensaft’s clinic is devoted to the controversial practice of sterilizing pre-pubertal children with off-label medications which stunt the growth of their genitals and reproductive system, preventing them from ever maturing. The formerly healthy children are then made dependent on cross-sex hormones, and the medical system, for life. Ehrensaft’s rationale for this practice is outlined in the writing excerpted below. The full text can be read here.

[*For the sake of clarity, each usage of the term “gender” in the text below has been replaced with the term “sex-role”.]

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“In traditional theories, it is assumed that children clearly know their own [sex-role] by the age of six, based on the sex assigned to them at birth, the early knowledge of that assignment, the [sex-role] socialisation that helps a child know how their [sex-role] should be performed and the evolving cognitive understanding of the stability of their [sex-role] identity. Yet if a child deviates from the sex assigned to them at birth or rejects the rules of [sex-role] embedded in the socialisation process, they are assumed to be too young to know their [sex-role], suffering from either [sex-role] confusion or a [sex-role] disorder.

Following this logic, if you are “cis-[sex-role]” (your sense of your [sex-role] matches the sex assigned on your birth certificate), you can know your [sex-role], but if you are trans-[sex-role] or [sex-role]-nonconforming, you cannot possibly know.

Yet a macro survey of trans-[sex-role] adults conducted in the US indicated that a large proportion of respondents knew at an early age what their true [sex-role] was – they just kept it under wraps because of social stigma in their childhood years. So we could say that [sex-role]-creative children can possibly know their [sex-role] – and do, at a very young age.”

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“Over the course of time, if we do not impose our own reactions and feelings on the children, like the ones above, and allow a space for their [sex-role] narrative to unfold, the [sex-role] they know themselves to be will come into clearer focus. From there we can give them the opportunity to transition to the [sex-role] that feels most authentic, followed later by the choice to use puberty blockers to put natal puberty on hold and later cross-sex hormones to bring their bodies into better sync with their psyche.

If we do not give them this opportunity, they may feel thwarted, frustrated, despondent, angry, deflated – feelings reflected in the symptoms correlated with being a [sex-role]-nonconforming or [sex-role]-dysphoric child. The root of these symptoms is not the child’s [sex-role], but rather the environment’s negative reactions to the child’s [sex-role].

When acceptance and allowance of the child to live in their authentic [sex-role] replace negation or suppression of a child’s nonconforming [sex-role], the symptoms have been known to subside or disappear completely, much to the surprise of those caring for the child. We might even consider [sex-role] as the cure, rather than the problem, privileging the child’s ability to not only feel, but know their [sex-role].”

107 Responses to “Consider Sex-Role as the Cure, Rather Than the Problem: Diane Ehrensaft’s Eugenics Solution”

When my daughter said, “I like boy things, not girl things”, referring to activities/toys, I replied, “There are no boy things or girl things.” At the time this seemed common sense to me. nowadays it’s radical. What the fuck happened?

” I’ll let you wear the boys pull ups, but you have to wear a dress. You don’t have to wear a dress, but you have to wear pink or purple. You can wear blue, but we have to get it from the girl’s section. You can wear boy’s clothes, but not the underwear. You can wear boys’ underwear, but you can’t shave your head. You can shave your head, but…but you can’t change your name.”

She’s a narcissist. It’s all “Me, me, me.”, the fab transmum. The whole article. And the bit when her daughter said she wanted to be a boy, “the bottom fell out of” her world. Not, “Ok, love, bedtime now.” No, the kid had to see a therapist.

I’m horrified at the comments on the site which praise this piece of self-congratulatory treacle. This is why we can’t have nice things. Like a gender-free society. Or sanity in childrearing.

Does it truly never occur to these parents to ask their toddlers WHY they think they want to be the other sex? Because children’s knowledge of reproductive biology in their first six or eight years ranges from hazy to non-existent, most of these so-called transchildren must simply be resisting early sex-role indoctrination. And since when did liking or disliking certain colors become a symptom of psychopathology requiring treatment? Talk about delusional!

A century or so ago, toddlers of both sexes wore very similar clothes and played with the same sorts of toys. In “Cinderella Ate My Daughter,” Peg Orenstein writes about the history of gendering clothes and toys for small children; it was basically promoted by companies and retailers to increase profits. This strikes me as similar to efforts to sell more makeup and clothing to women.

Now we have a growing industry of therapists and doctors who make money from those who resist the propaganda of the mad men. Gender is profitable.

If you look at old photos of infants, you frequently can’t tell the difference between the boys and girls. They’re all dressed in what are basically dresses, which seems practical for an infant still in diapers, and their hair is kept fairly short, but still long enough to be coded, in this day and age, as female. It seems like a major rite of passage for boys back then was when they were finally permitted to wear proper boys’/men’s clothes.

Some of you may find this interesting. In the introduction of Vested Interests by Marjorie Garber she explains that the pink/blue girl/boy correlation was actually reversed after WWII. It’s fascinating stuff. You can skim through parts if you’re willing to follow the link and click on the image.

@Kesher It was definitely a rite of passage! Even up to 100 years ago this was a big deal. A survivor of the Titanic recalled that a friend turned 16 and exchanged short pants for long pants, and was not permitted to get in the lifeboats for “being a man” instead of a child at that point. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeching_(boys)

@australopithecene: Is narcissism a key trait in transgenders? I ask because I am puzzled that the transgenders and crossdressers I’ve seen on social networks are constantly posting photos of themselves, apparently expecting praise and often receiving lots of it. In some cases, they’re posting these photos in online communities in which personal conversation or photos aren’t typical. For example, in a professional organization’s Facebook group, one recently posted a photo of himself dressed in a revealing women’s party dress. The event he had been attending in the photo had nothing to do with the group. The photo was solely of himself, not of himself and other members from the group. It seems so illogical, but perhaps narcissism explains it?

Damn. When I was very young (four or so), I wanted to be a cowboy. Not a cowgirl, but a cowboy. I hated wearing dresses and preferred wearing jeans, shirts, cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. I have no idea where that came from as I lived in a city.

Anyway, I’m glad my parents weren’t wacko. They let me have my cowboy gear and toy horse and that was that. Sometimes kids just like stuff that’s often promoted to the opposite sex. It doesn’t mean that the child is transgender and needs to be sterilized.

Buying clothes for a baby girl that aren’t tight and covered with itchy bows and lacey neckline is close to impossible. When I got home, and was cutting tags off, I noticed that all the sturdy and comfortable clothes I had picked out were all labeled for boys. Yup, socialization starts at birth. When my daughter continues to choose comfortable tees and shorts over tights and lacy leotards, which I assume any child who wants to run around and play would, that will not make her “trans”, it will make her a female child in comfortable clothing.

I’m reminded of lyrics from Michael Jackson’s song, Black or White: “I’m not going to spend my life being a color.” These kids are being put on expensive hormones they’ll take daily for life…they’re going to spend their lives being a sex-role.

Also — I have noticed that in the last few years, the term “gender non-conforming” has been co-opted by the pro-trans ideologues. It used to be one of the last few terms available for people who wanted to indicate that they rejected socially-imposed sex roles without claiming that this somehow made them a member of the opposite sex.

Now “gender non-conforming” is being used as another term for “somewhere on the transgender spectrum.” There’s still the underlying assumption that gender conformity is normal and innate in most people.

Changing “gender” to “sex role,” as you have done here, causes the whole disgusting house of cards to tumble down.

I avoid the use of the phrase “gender non-conforming” for the reasons you cite. Rather, I say, “Non sex-stereotypical personality”. Because that’s what “gender” and “gender expression” really are. It’s personality and personal style which are, of course, not innately sex-linked, so there’s nothing to “match” with one’s body. (And who says people have to “match”, anyway?).

Oh, and thanks so much Gallus Mag for replacing the word “gender” with sex-role. I get so tired of reading articles that are all gender, gender, gender, every few sentences. There’s only so much eye-rolling I can take at any given time.😉

I agree, it is time to drop the use of the word “gender”. It is now being used interchangeably to conflate “biological sex” and “sex role” to suit whatever point the transactivists want to make at any given moment.

[“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass ]

The author discusses a number of books about transgendered children, including “I am Jazz” and a really stupid sounding one about a red crayon that could only draw blue (how does that even make sense?), then goes on to say of all those children who meet traditional gender expectations:

“Alas, for decades this has put them at odds with the gender-industrial complex, those busy feminist academics and journalists who insist that societal messages, not innate sex differences, make children behave in masculine or feminine ways.”

While we’re on the subject of not making sense, this is the equivalent of claiming anti-war activists make up the military-industrial complex, a term that referred to those who profited from their alliance. Exactly which “industries” are colluding with feminists to increase the power and income of both groups?

Towards the end of the piece, we find explicit evidence for what radfems have been claiming about the whole trans business–that many people support it exactly because it reinforces traditional sex roles:

“The experience of transgender people, who from earliest childhood have genuinely felt that they belong to the other sex, gives the lie to the propagandists who have sought for more than a generation to bend society to their will.”

and

“This brings us to an ironic possibility: The new crop of books for children featuring transgender people may have the effect of validating traditional sex differences. After all, if we are to respect the boy who believes himself to be female, surely we must also respect the boy who feels fully male—and not browbeat either of them to be something other than they are.”

My search also turned up a link to a transcript of a conservative Christian podcast that refers to Gurdon’s article. This guy thinks her comments about feminists are brilliant, approves of the last paragraph I quoted above, but on the whole believes she doesn’t understand how dangerous the trans trend really is. And he completely confounds second and third wave feminism while asserting that feminism makes contradictory claims. I’m sure we’re all shocked by that.

Sorry to post so much text, Gallus Mag, but Gurdon’s piece seemed to belong with your post and the essay you linked to in the comments.

“It occurred to me that those profiting from gender could be said to constitute a “gender industrial complex,” so I googled the term to see if anyone else had suggested that.”

Medical ethicist and feminist Janice Raymond termed this medical/psychiatric/pharma/industrial industry “The Transsexual Empire” in 1979. It was this (then) coalescing industry designed to profit off the suffering of sex-role malcontents, that she suggested need be “mandated out of existence”, not through force of law, but through changing the practice of social enforcement of sex-roles themselves. This would eliminate the basis of the industry/empire at the root.

To clarify–since I realize I wasn’t specific enough in my comment–I meant more than just the trans industry. I intended “gender industrial complex” to include all industries that profit from supposed gender differences–Raymond’s medical/psychiatric/pharma coalition, the marketing of gender from infancy described by Peggy Orenstein, and the whole business of selling “femininity” in the form of clothes, beauty products, etc., that feminists have been talking about for years.

No surprise there’s so much pushback against getting rid of sex roles when that many people are literally invested in gender!

This woman — spokesperson and propagandist for the oppressive and violent system of normalized, naturalized, neutralized, inevitable and rigid sex-roles — is terrifying.

When you call this her “Eugenics Solution,” Gallus, you don’t overstate the case. Also, your illustration is perfect — a perfect horror: mutilating and poisoning children’s bodies to make their personalities, interests, nascent desires and behaviours more palatable to their families and the society at large. The director of children’s mental health has spoken: one’s psyche really should match its flesh-and-blood packaging. In “sync,” indeed. March to the beat — or else, big trouble!

And, as usual, this authoritarianism is all wrapped up in the language of love and understanding, social progress, acceptance and choice. How can sex-roles be the problem when we’re giving kids of either sex two choices: A or B, pink or blue, low status or higher status, objectified or objectifier. Do you want to be oppressed or have a chance at being the oppressor? Which one suits you better, sweetheart? Which one feels more “authentic” for you? We have medicine and operations for that. We can fix you.

What happened to the gender-queer pop culture of the 1980s? Grace Jones, David Bowie, Poison? I don’t know if MTV was trying to make a sociological statement with all that, but at least it was fun. It seems we’ve actually regressed since then, and the “kids aren’t alright.”

Ha! Yes, of course — that’s the standard retort, which is supposed to prove … what? Something. It’s ostensibly a “gotcha.” And I certainly thought of that while I was writing “two choices.” But it deserves no acknowledgement or attention.

Genderqueer theory seems to follow the Baskin-Robbins ice-cream model: they started with 31 flavours, and now they’re up to a thousand and change. But all ice-cream, no matter what’s added to it, is made of cream and sugar. Likewise, all gender is made of sexed people granted either full human status or semi-human status. Any other terminology is meaningless drivel.

Actually, Mint Chocolate Chip or Rocky Road are much more meaningful, distinctive and coherent than “bigender” or “agender.” Seeing as that, in reality, people are recognized for their sex (not their “bigender” haircuts) and are treated more or less accordingly …

Insistence, persistence, and suicide. These are the current public relations idioms being utilized by the transgender children eugenicists. Here is a great example from the LATimes today in a testimonial from the mother of a girl who underwent this treatment:

“Julie Mellen of Los Angeles says she regrets her initial reaction to her child’s identity:

I am the mother of a transgender boy. We found out soon after he went through female puberty, which was very stressful for him. It took us a year of therapy to allow him to go on hormone blockers, and another year for testosterone. I regret those years; so much time was wasted. I wish I could go back and change them.

Now my son is a happy, healthy, fully transitioned boy. He knew he was a boy when he was 12; he saw a television show that had a transgender character, and he finally understood what he was going through.

I wish we could have known then, to spare him the emotional distress he experienced. Children know their gender when they are young. I have met many, many trans children in the last four years, only one whose mind changed. Had I known what transgender was when he was younger, I would have seen the signs. We just thought he would grow up to be a lesbian. How ignorant we were.

Insisting that children try to match the genitalia they were born with, and not supporting their insistence and persistence that they are the opposite gender, is one of the roads that leads a young person to suicide. Forty-one percent of transgender people report attempting suicide, compared with 1.6% of the general population.

I would say this to parents with trans kids: You’ve woken up every morning, knowing fully what gender you are. Well, it’s the same for trans kids. Trust them to know their own gender no matter how old they are. No one chooses to be transgender; it’s not a phase.

Having your child alive is so much better than having to go through the heartache of losing your child to suicide because of hopelessness.”

The falsely Inflated 41% transgender suicide attempt statistic and falsely deflated 1.6% suicide attempt statistic of the general public (actual rate 4.1%) were concocted from an anonymous 2008 internet survey titled “National Transgender Discrimination Survey” at the URL “endtransdiscrim”. Respondents were advised in the survey introduction that the 70 questions to follow might induce suicidality, and contact information for a suicide hotline was included in the introduction.
(https://web.archive.org/web/20081121052005/https://online.survey.psu.edu/endtransdiscrim/ ) What are purported to be the results of this survey were later published under the name “Injustice at Every Turn”. These figures have never been replicated.

“Insisting that children try to match the genitalia they were born with” describes the cultural practice of attaching unrelated characteristics (personality traits) to children based on their reproductive biology. Feminists are against this practice. However, feminists are also against the practice of medically altering the reproductive biology of children to “match” the child’s personality traits.

“We found out soon after he went through female puberty, which was very stressful for him. It took us a year of therapy to allow him to go on hormone blockers, and another year for testosterone. I regret those years; so much time was wasted. I wish I could go back and change them.”

She “regrets” getting her child therapy; she “regrets” resisting (at least for a stretch of time) giving dangerous puberty blockers and male sex hormones to her young daughter. She regrets, then, being a caring and responsible parent.

In other words, now that she’s been fully indoctrinated, she’s ashamed that she had paid some attention to her own hunches about this bullshit. She’s been shamed — by people with authority over her, no doubt, and probably shamed specifically as a woman and a mother — for not being a believer. For having had more faith in her intellectual inklings and emotional instincts than in all the bugaboos associated with “gender identity” including the very concept itself.

She sounds like a sinner confessing her sins in front of the man-of-God and the entire congregation. You know, she was blind, but now she sees.

What really gets me is that I fail to see what “sin” she committed. How did her daughter really suffer to such an extent that the mother has to feel so guilty? She’s still alive, right? Her body, I presume, is already becoming masculinized. Where’s the wasted time? Where’s the harm even by trans ideology’s own standards?

So she put her daughter on testosterone at 14??? And wishes she had done so earlier?
Wow. Super creepy.
There really isn’t much cosmetic benefit to halting puberty in females, or starting females on testosterone at an earlier age. As transgenderists like to say, “Testosterone Adds, Estrogen does not Subtract”. They’ll still need their nipples reduced and repositioned for their chests to “pass as male” while shirtless, even if you halt breast development. Testosterone will make females look more male at any age. It’s the effects of testosterone on males -or females- that are “irreversible”. Not estrogen.

Giving testosterone to a minor. Great. Nothing bad ever happens to female bodies when they inject this drug. But hey! She looks male! Ok, her health is destroyed but at least she now can have and do all the “boys stuff” she wants! Screw the consequences! Boy stuff!

I think we may under estimate the pressure this woman may have been under to join the cult. There is very little help given to worried and confused parents other than to ”get on board” the programme. No wonder she sounds like a repentant sinner, as morag99 says.
My personal anger is directed towards those who gave this mother no choice, who didn’t back her up with her wish to give her child more time, who fed her doubt and falsified suicide statistics.

A few years ago when the trans issue started to impact on my life because my husband declared himself to be a ”woman” a friend put me in touch with a friend of hers who’s daughter was transitioning. This was the first person that I’d spoken to who had direct experience of trans issues. This woman, who considered herself a second wave feminist, told me that she had no choice but to ”get on board the train because it had already left the station”. Her daughter was a young lesbian and was transitioning, taking T and breast binding. I was struck then that this rational woman had to go along with it or risk losing her daughter. She now considers that she has a son. We stopped corresponding as we were so far apart in our views. She offered to put me in touch with various support groups all of which had the same cultish feel. As someone who spent her teenage years rebelling against organised religion ( my family is catholic) I couldn’t contemplate giving my freedom of thought and speech over to a ”higher authority”, but I understand that need to belong to feel like the chosen ones, especially if the choice given is hell and damnation.

Her reaction only makes sense if she has come to believe that a) “brain sex” is a real and immutable thing, proven by science, and that it’s possible for a “gendered” brain to be born into the wrong body; that b) blockers/hormones/surgeries are benign and without significant long-term health risk; and that c) the only alternative to a drug/surgery “solution” is death. Only acceptance of this trifecta of “facts” could account for the decisions people are making for their minor kids. (Well, and the Munchausen-by-proxy possibility, but that’s another discussion.)

As long as the “experts” keep spouting this party line, parents will continue to feel pressured into doing what the docs advise, regardless of whatever gut-level commonsense tells them. There are almost NO professional opposing voices out there, or at least none who get media coverage. Any parent who does not get with the program is deemed neglectful at best and abusive at worst. I anticipate the day when failing to medically treat a “trans” child or minor teen with blockers/hormones will be grounds for having social services remove the child from parental care so more “responsible” and “supportive” adults can take over.

I don’t think anyone who is ‘informed’ misunderstands the pressure. My sister and I were adopted by parents who became such later than most, because they adopted in their early 40s following several miscarriages on Mum’s part. One unforseen consequence of that is that Ang and I were pubescent/dating/being teens whilst Mum was hitting menopause. There were a lot of hormones swilling around in our house at the time, and I wish in retrospect that our folks were the sort to deal with that out in te open. Not so, and it’s hard – in retrospect – not to lay the blame for unnecessarily complicating an already uncertain situation on ‘gender’:Divisions between sexes and generations made things harder than they needed to be. Something I’ll always remember about the last few months of Mum’s life – and my subsequent relationship with Dad – is how we were let in, treated as fellow humans.

Germaine Greer wrote a pithy essay years back about ‘Pantomime Dames’ and how, when their bones were excavated, they’d be correctly identified as male. It’s not a precise parallel, but it does bring to my mind, how ultimately inconsequential these gendered conceits are, when death – or even its prospect – renders them null and void. If anything, the whole Trans* phenomenon highlights the pivotal rôle of mortality in the construction of gender: the desperation and canny-ness of women to avoid death; males’ rush to embrace it, profit from its prospect. Are we just more scared of it?

We just thought he would grow up to be a lesbian. How ignorant we were.

This makes my blood run cold. This girl should have been told that there was nothing wrong with her or any girl who wants something other than the whole pink princess thing. There is nothing wrong with being a girl who has ordinary human interests. There is nothing wrong with a girl growing up to be a woman who is attracted to other women.

But there is something very evil about destroying girls who want to be human by telling them they must really be a “boy”.

I love the notion that, if your body and mind “match” (how? WTF cares?) then puberty is just nothing but a cakewalk!! Because all those “cis” just fly through puberty with a giggle!! Seriously, it is so heartbreaking to see parents ignore symptoms of serious mental health issues by focusing on their kid being trans. But we live in a society where the answer to every problem is found at the bottom of a bottle of pills.

And anything is better than questioning how your own parenting may have contributed to your child’s mental health issues. One of the greatest things any parent can do is openly reject, in front of their children, authoritarian models and force. If you question societal values and are a frank and open parent, your child will be far less likely to fall prey to propaganda and predators.

How is this not considered child abuse!? I’m watching a news story about two parents who were charged for child abuse for allowing their children ages 6 and 10 to walk home from the playground by themselves. Thankfully that decision was reversed, but it goes to show how ridiculous that decision is. They were calling the two kids “free-range children”. (Is that like free range chicken?) The parents were self-aware enough to realize that if they had been racially and/or class-oppressed they probably wouldn’t have won the case. When I was that age, I would walk a mile and back from school.

Letting your kids play in the playground=child abuse but eugenics is a-okay. What a fucked up society we live in. The whole thing is creepy and this woman should be in jail. I predict it will take a lot of destroyed lives and lawsuits before this madness ceases.

I agree with GallusMag about how the story about the mother who regretted waiting until her daughter was FOURTEEN to put her on testosterone and regretted trying to support her in growing up to be a lesbian. The trans cult is eugenics against lesbians! It is no different than lesbians being forcibly institutionalized in psychiatric wards, tortured, and given experimental drugs. Some lesbians and gays severely hated themselves and volunteered for that, but it didn’t make it okay and it doesn’t make testosterone poisoning okay or forcing off-label drugs on children for not conforming to sex-roles.

Trans people are the biggest sex-role conformists in the world, thinking that surgery is necessary so your body matches sex stereotypes. It’s awful that they and their enablers drag innocent children into this.

I met to say that the decision to charge parents with child abuse was ridiculous and it shows how ridiculous society is when kids walking home from a playground is considered abuse and neglect, but sterilizing your child for not conforming to sex roles and setting them up for a lifetime of dependance on Big-Pharma is not only okay, but progressive. That wording looked a little off when I re-read it, my bad.

Having been a foster parent, I will state uncategorically that caseworkers are far more likely to persecute people they do not fear, e.g., the couple who let their children walk to the playground by themselves. Do we really think there were no children in that community who were actually at risk?

That makes sense. Go after the low-hanging fruit. I still think the whole situation was ridiculous because if you’re 30 and up you were probably a “free-range” kid. Plus I think it’s worse for a kid to be isolated at home all day, with the computer and the high-speed access to porn.

I was a free-range kid in elementary school, but my parents started to get paranoid when I was middle school.

“Over the course of time, if we do not impose our own reactions and feelings on the children”

How do we even being with this ? She is saying that imposing these gender boxes on children is not imposing but letting children actually be ordinary human beings is ? And as usual the mainstream sucks up this garbled line of thought. Engage your brains people !

Reading about the PsychD and PhD training at the Psychoanalytic Institute where this PhD Diane Ehrensaft is on staff- they also train PsychD’s, who are the ones authorized to legally dispense experimental drugs, in cahoots with a psychoanalytic based counselling program. What could go wrong for children at their hands?

Besides her private practice, this dokter enjoys a completely trans-fed livelihood. Serving on national boards, in private practice, on staff at psychoanalytic institute, also works for a nonprofit which has a national network providing free psychotherapy for foster youth.

One of the network providers of free psychological counselling for foster youth in her nonprofit is a PharmD in Boise who also runs an “affordable” surrogacy clinic in her rural community.

Recent articles about modern fiction have been asking, “Why is science fiction so dystopian these days?” or “Why have young adult books become so dystopian?”

I read these and think, Are you kidding me? Are you paying any attention at all?

And the people I know in real life who discuss those questions seriously are SJW types who think we’re riding the trans train to a freer society. From where I’m standing, it looks more like gender fascism.

Oak and Ash, I agree its gender fascism. Look at Berlin pre-WWII cabaret, transvestite, bondage, pro-violence, and propaganda machine in full effect, what do you see? Misogyny. Yes, the speed with which trans cult gain ascendance over females and in charge of alphabet soup insanity was dazzling. I was, at first, charmed. Oh, how nice. Society is becoming nicer. Then the demands grew. Then the gay mafia was in every city in way out of proportion to local citizenry natural incidence. It had recently increased to surreal levels – until the dams have now broken thanks to radical feminists and free thinkers.

200 species going extinct each day. Reality is becoming dystopian. For the profits to be made the sheeple have to be kept silenced. What better way to control people than to police talk about and encourage bizarre sex titillations.

Time to boycott the boys culture. Can wee not get a XX List marketplace – a female Silk Road but w/o the drugs?

I’m sure the parents care. It is just the damned suicide trope — you know, a few Leelah stories trump a lot of “well, we don’t really have good long-term studies about the health effects of T in natal females.” And all the “completely reversible, time-buying” blah blah blah being offered re the blockers.

If your kid is at all depressed, being bullied, highly insistent/persistent/consistent (the new slogan) and this single professional point of view is all you are given by the pros who are supposed to understand these things? A lot of ppl will just sign the consent and hope for the best. And then get a whole lot of social strokes for being “brave” and supporting the journey or … whatever the lingo du jour is.

I notice it is mostly mothers who are vocal about their trans kids. Its not because they are brave, its because they have been terrorized into submission.

Mothers must be subjugated because we provide the human capital males exploit for profit and pleasure.

From almost the instant my first child was born, in all that happiness and joy there was fear. Sheer and utter terror. I was told repeatedly that this feeling was natural. That all mother have crazed “unsubstantiated” fears like:

Will my child be molested?Kidknapped? Raped and murdered? Will her father do the right thing financially? Emotionally?Will he leave? Stay? And how will I protect my child?

Suddenly I was feeling more vulnerable to male violence and dominance. At the very moment I needed to be assertive, authoritative, and dominant, I was dismissed as a weak, overly emotional, hysterically brainless breeder.

This “disarming” of mothers is deliberate, strategic, and insidious.

And if our children turn out to be miserable, for any reason, it is all our fault. Trans picks at this sore spot until is a gaping wound.

These mothers might not admit that what they are doing is wrong. But they know transexualizing a child isn’t right. Trans activitivists have bullied them into making a Sophie’s Choice. They have to watch the bodies of their little boys and little girls poisoned with toxic hormones. They have to perpetually drown out their instincts. They have endure the grief with a smile because they don’t want their child to be unhappy and they don’t want to have to put them in an early grave.

“They have endure the grief with a smile because they don’t want their child to be unhappy and they don’t want to have to put them in an early grave.”

But they do it anyway by allowing doctors to give dangerous gnrh antagonists and hormones to children. The causes of the childs dysphoria aren’t examined. Is it because of trauma? Disorder? Mental illness? All these things can’t be erased by injecting drugs that disturb natural processes in the body. It can make things MUCH worse.

Sorry but I absolutely have no sympathy for people who let these things happen to their children because it’s the children who have to deal with the consequences their entire lives.

I’m with you on this, Lilly. I accept that there are social pressures to do this to your child, but it is not enough to act as though parents are helpless, passive bystanders in their children’s lives. If one thinks like this, it totally lets one off the hook regarding any responsibility for bringing a child into the world. I’ve heard too many parents say a child runs the household as though they are five and their daughter/son is the adult in charge.

It seems that right now there is a lot of positive attention to be had by transing your child, which is sickening. I agree with the earlier commenter who pointed out that the woman who is giving her 14-year-old daughter testosterone came across as very narcissistic.

The BBC recently reported that the number of children aged ten and under who were referred to the NHS in the UK to help deal with transgender feelings had more than quadrupled in six years.

There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that future historians will view this as just another ghastly human experiment akin to lobotomies.

How does a child under the age of 10 know that he or she is “transgender”? At this young age, what is really happening is parents projecting their view of “gender” onto their children. Or, they see something on t.v., and come to the conclusion that their six year old child really is transgender because the child doesn’t play with the right toys.

Why do they intentionally mislead people. The Child and Adolescent Gender Center (CAGC) states the following:

Medical treatment may include administration of gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists (GnRH-A). These hormones can safely suppress puberty by blocking the production of the principal sex hormones: estrogen and testosterone. Fully reversible, this treatment gives young people time to achieve greater self-awareness of their gender identification. If and when appropriate, our experts may administer cross-gender sex hormones.

What these medical professional are essentially saying is that plan on sterilizing some children. Most rational people view the sterilization of children as a human rights abuse.

How do they know that the effects of GnRH agonists on developing bodies are “fully reversable”, and are we to believe that they “safely supress puberty”?

They know full well that some, if not most, of these children will go from the puberty suppressing drugs to cross gender hormones. Pumping a kid full of cross gender hormones before their bodies have time to sexually mature renders them infertile.

Deliberate delaying a normal part of human development, adolescence, because of what basically amounts to a questionable psychiatric diagnosis in healthy children assumes all the following:

(a.) The diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” is correct to being with, and there isn’t something else going on in the child’s life.

(b.) The child is completely free from any parental, peer, or cultural influences. How much is “gender dysphoria” in a 12 year old child, and how do we separate this from everything the parents read on transgender websites and blogs? How much is actual “gender dysphoria” or GID and how much is parental discomfort at having a child that doesn’t fit neatly into sex based gender roles?

(c.) Children have the mental capacity to decide or choose for themselves.

It’s a scientific fact that the pre-frontal cortex of the human brain which is sometimes called the judgment center of the brain isn’t fully developed until the early to mid-twenties.

The prefrontal cortex, the part of the frontal lobes lying just behind the forehead, is often referred to as the “CEO of the brain.” This brain region is responsible for cognitive analysis and abstract thought, and the moderation of “correct” behavior in social situations. The prefrontal cortex takes in information from all of the senses and orchestrates thoughts and actions to achieve specific goals. This brain region gives an individual the capacity to exercise “good judgment” when presented with difficult life situations.

We don’t let children vote or take out bank loans, but they are supposedly mature enough to give up their fertility.

Excellent article and wonderful posts in this thread. However, I am very disgusted right now. How can a parent be at peace with rendering their children infertile? Big Pharma as the One True Way? What the ever loving fuck?

Because they see no other way. Because any Psychological, Psychiatric, Medical, or Counseling practitioners are prevented from developing, practicing, researching or even proposing any alternative solutions to sex-role dysphoria and/or body dysmorphia by the adult transgender political lobby (who are largely comprised of conservative sexist homophobic middle-aged heterosexual white males armed with all their attendant privileges and power).

A good example of this is the fact that there are no services dedicated to serving the population of transgender individuals that consider themselves transgender but are unable to medically “transition” due to underlying health issues. Surely if such medical transition is “lifesaving” and medically necessary then there must be some concern and support towards those who are “doomed” by their inability to tolerate such desired treatment due to pre-existing health issues? But no such alternate support has ever been developed or even proposed.

When Joel Nowak of http://retransition.org/ contacted WPATH (the transgender lobbying group that bills itself as the world authority on the management of transgender health care) requesting information on stopping hormones (which transgender people do all the time for various reasons) or medically re-transitioning he was told that WPATH had ZERO information to offer such transgender people. When he tried to set up a crisis/suicide service himself (after undergoing extensive formal training from established suicide prevention authorities) for medically non, or re-transitioning transgender people he was banned from transgender websites and forums for doing so.

”Because any Psychological, Psychiatric, Medical, or Counseling practitioners are prevented from developing, practicing, researching or even proposing any alternative solutions to sex-role dysphoria and/or body dysmorphia by the adult transgender political lobby…..”

Dr Susan Bradley who,in the 1970’s founded the child and adolescent gender identity clinic at the Clarke Institute in Toronto, which eventually became part of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) has come under attack from the trans lobby for adopting an old-fashioned therapeutic response to children who present with gender issues. She has been accused of child abuse for expressing views such as this…

“Some of these kids are quite significantly ill,” says Dr. Bradley. “They often have serious family problems and anxiety disorders. Or they’ve had serious trauma. A girl I saw had been raped, and after that she decided she was going to be a male. If you didn’t pay attention to the trauma you’re not doing that kid a service.”

I would not be too hasty to call Susan Bradley an advocate for kids who don’t conform sex roles, or someone who has their best interests at heart.

The therapies that she and Kenneth Zucker have promoted involve trying to push kids into sex-stereotyped behavior. They are still genderists in that they don’t completely separate the idea of adjusting to a social sex role from the idea of being okay with your male or female body.

If I remember correctly, Susan Faludi discussed them in Backlash. (I don’t have a copy ready to hand.) There’s quite a bit about them in Phyllis Burke’s book Gender Shock. Burke was writing circa 1991 about therapies and other practices that treated sex-role non-compliance in children as a disorder; her focus was on the 70s and 80s. Bradley and Zucker do not come off well — their practices look like a more mainstream version of what George Rekers was doing in the 70s.

Burke does pays lip service, in this book, to the idea that transition is fine and dandy for some adults; however she is absolutely against the idea of innate sex roles.

Don’t get me wrong — I consider the trans-ing of kids to be a human rights abuse. I think the doctors who prescribe Lupron for this purpose belong in jail. But taking a kid to someone like Bradley instead of, say, Johanna Olson or Norman Spack is like pulling them out of the fire only to put them back in a very hot frying pan.

Btw — I did read the articles you linked, and saw the part about Zucker not insisting that a couple different girls be pushed into femininity. In the case of the first one, though, the fact that she “now likes having long hair” is still trotted out as a sign of adjustment. Also, he still makes a distinction between “gender neutral clothing” and “boys’ clothing.” (He counseled the same girl’s parents to buy her gender-neutral clothing, but not boys’ clothing. WTF? Is a blank t-shirt gender-neutral, but one with a picture of Darth Vader for boys? That’s a very fine, not to mention artificial line, and again, if this girl’s real problem was that she didn’t like herself, why could she not learn to like herself with her existing hairstyle and taste in clothes?

Zucker’s made statements as recently as the last decade condoning George Rekers’ behavior-modification practices, which he considers to have been acceptable by the standards of the 1970s. Suuuure — there’s nothing wrong with a psychologist who, in the era of “Free to be you and me” thinks it’s a good idea to use Pavlovian conditioning methods on a ten-year-old girl to try and get her to stop playing with footballs and start playing with dolls. (The girl was known as “Becky” in her case history.) Rekers’ pseudo-therapies are also known to have contributed to the suicide of at least one former patient (known as “Kraig” in his case history).

I also remember reading an interview with Zucker about 10 years ago in which he stated that parents are within their rights to seek to have their child’s behavior modified to “standard boy and girl behavior.”

He may have become more open-minded about the idea that sex-role non-compliance isn’t a disorder, but if so, it’s a recent change, and I’m skeptical about what’s motivating it. Since reparative therapy’s gotten a lot of (deserved) bad press in the last few years, he may be trying to disassociate his own practices from that in the public mind. However, he’s spent most of his career trying to shoehorn kids into gender boxes in the name of saving them from ending up trans — and 20-30 years ago, he was fairly open about also trying to prevent them from ending up gay.

And at the root of this attitude is the notion that “healthy” people conform to their society’s standards. If your society’s standard is to commit pogroms, then that is “health.” If your society’s standard is to stone women who have been raped, then that is “health.” So of course in a heavily sex-role stereotyped society, health is conforming to sex roles. The problem is that such notions have nothing to do with health and everything to do with the therapist’s dysfunctional brain and fat wallet.

P.S. I appreciate the criticisms of the word gender and the replacement of gender with sex-role.

Yes, this is just common sense and basic good care! But anything other than transactivist orthodoxy will be painted as “conversion therapy” from here forward.

Not just in Canada. In the US now, too. Any kind of youth counseling that doesn’t treat transgenderism as a foregone conclusion will be lumped right in with gay conversion therapy and the push is on to ban.

President Obama lent his support recently after a petition on Whitehouse.gov calling for “Leelah’s Law to Ban All LGBTQ+ Conversion Therapy” received more than 120K signatures.

I worry that some of these troubled children may actually be at greater risk of suicide when they reach their twenties and regret what was done to them. What I hope is that at least a few of them will have what it takes to speak out and fight back so other children aren’t harmed.

At the moment, the child bears all the future risk, not the parents or trans industry. To the degree that profit’s accelerating the trend of transing children, I predict it will take a few well-publicized lawsuits with large payouts to put the brakes on it.

It appears there’s a summer camp where “trans” boys go to femme it up. (www.youareyouproject.com) Norman Spack appears to be a supporter. Amazing, no? It further appears that the last day’s event is–are you sitting down?–a fashion show with lots of sparkle, pink, and lipstick, watched of course by an audience of admiring, applauding adults. Slate.com has photos, I’m afraid, and text filled with awed admiration of the courageous blahblahblah.

So there are many parents like me on this blog with young daughters who are caught up in this madness. We are talking to the choir here with our thoughts and feelings. But how do we get these common sense ideas out to the public? The public is only hearing one side of this issue. It seems like there are enough of us here who would be willing to invest into finding a way to stop our voices from being suppressed so that we don’t just live here in the blog world? Right now most anti transgender messages in the media are coming from the right wing that is anti gay and anti womens rights. We parents are not some fringe element. We are women who are able to think critically and not fall for groupthink.

Form a support network. Name the group. Define your mission. Write a mission statement. Appoint a spokesperson(s). Set up a website and meeting schedule. Appoint a secretary. Send out press releases. Form a board of trustees. File for non-profit status. Appoint a treasurer. Create programming and literature.

Yes. Send out press releases announcing the existence of your organization to the media. Then, contact the media in a timely fashion in response to various articles or news stories as they emerge. Also, create your own news stories, and contact the media to cover them.

All good advice. Problem is … I think it might work better with parents of little kids? Those of us who have teens who are currently teetering on the brink with the transition conundrum really cannot be conducting media campaigns without risking relationship damage, unfortunately. My top priority is keeping my daughter safe and preserving this trust relationship to a degree where I hope she can still hear my voice among all the other voices coming at her with regard to these issues. And frankly I think that this concern for trust/privacy is why you do not hear a lot of public commentary (as opposed to anonymous online chatter/blogging) from parents who are avoiding the currently popular blocker/hormone/surgery program. They aren’t interested in making their kids poster children for a cause, and they aren’t too stoked about having to deal with the predictable charges of being transphobic abusers. They’re not looking for a lot of validation for their super-brave parenting skills. They’re just trying to live like normal people and encourage their kids to live healthy lives and make healthy choices.

It’s frustrating, but at least for me, that’s the hard truth of the matter, regarding privacy. If more reasonable professional voices in medical ethics are stymied and lack of decent research continues, I think it’s going to take the passage of time — and some messy lawsuits — for the tide to turn. (Unless there are parents who are a lot more “let the chips fall where they may” than I am. Maybe there will be some.)

It’s certainly true that Parents in support of gender-resistant youth are the least likely to want to compromise their children’s privacy and anonymity. They certainly won’t in most cases be pimping out their kids to the media as the transgenderist parents do. Many would likely request pseudonyms be used by media outlets. Some transgenderist parents do this as well. As I understand it, the “Maines” family from Maine uses a family pseudonym. Jazz Jennings and the whole “Jennings” family is using a pseudonym. Jennings is not their real name. Etc.

I write and edit for a living and would be happy to donate some time to the sort of non-profit group Gallus Mag is suggesting.

It’s one thing for us to trade jokes about Bruce and Carlotta and all the other middle-class, middle-aged white men in the trans clown car–even as I’m angered at the invasion of women’s spaces and the expectation that we settle for pacing the bars of an ever-smaller gendered cage–because laughing at power weakens it and makes it easier to fight.

But when it comes to children’s long-term wellbeing, I feel pure outrage. These men are using and damaging children in order to cover up the fetishistic reality of their own transitions. It’s nothing less than abuse by proxy.

If you do set up such a group, please return and let us know so that those of us willing to share our skills can lend a hand in pushing back against this insanity.

Get in contact with Mark Cummings. This person is a famous trans activist who supported the transgendering of children but stopped because she realized how fucked up and dangerous it is. Now she argues against it. The more people find each other to help and support gnc children the better.

As Turtle54 says, preaching to the converted is one thing, getting the message out is something else and Puzzled is right in that wishing to protect our own and most importantly our children’s
anonymity is one of the main reasons that it’s just not happening.

I’m coming to this whole trans issue as the mother of teenage kids witnessing their own father’s transition. Whilst having my own personal battles with my ex, which have been extremely traumatic at times, my main concern has been to respect their needs and reduce their trauma. All family support groups follow the trans party line and the more I read and understand about things in the trans world the more appalled I become about the misinformation produced at all levels and the silencing tactics used.

The trans lobby has been extremely clever in their stealth approach, their hijacking of LGB rights, their dissemination of falsehood as medical fact, their infiltration into liberal feminism and their silencing of dissident voices and they’ve been doing it for many years. They have the backing of government policy and a largely fawning media.

Maybe a grass roots organisation is the best way forward which would bring together the way that trans issues impact on others; when husbands and fathers transition, children at ever younger ages are treated for not complying with expected sex-roles, teenage girls think that they need to become men rather than lesbians and women’s spaces are no longer women’s spaces.

Finding a spokesperson for such a disparate group may be difficult though.

Short story at Yahoo Parenting on a mom petitioning to have Lupron covered by Medicaid. Reporter at least devoted a decent amount of space to the side effects of Lupron, which is rare in itself. In a couple days this piece, which I think was supposed to be the typical feelgood piece complete with inspirational capping quotes, attracted more than a thousand comments. Those I flipped through were uniformly negative. Not just negative but outraged. A lot of “hey, go be crazy if you have to, but don’t expect me to pay for it.”

Throughout, there is a very strong sense of “stop shoving this delusional bullshit down our throats and telling us we are supposed to support it and act like it’s normal.”

In addition to a very healthy portion of “these parents are crazy.”

That’s a snapshot of what most people REALLY thing about this, beneath their efforts to be polite in the way that everyone is told they are supposed to be polite to those who are different. Most rational people can see bad “medicine” for what it is.

As an aside — I have to thank you, GallusMag, for letting us take up some of your bandwidth discussing this. Your work has been crucial to a lot of people’s ability to get their minds around the whole trans business, not to mention foundational principles of feminism. It’s been not only consciousness-raising for me but also helped strengthen me to deal with my kid’s non-sex-role-stereotypical desires without falling prey to the current clinical insanity.

“Your work has been crucial to a lot of people’s ability to get their minds around the whole trans business, not to mention foundational principles of feminism.”

Yes, GallusMag, I so concur with Puzzled. You as well as others online have schooled me and continue to teach me about Feminism in all its forms. Yours is one of the sites that I often return to. I realized after doing a lot of reading that much of what Radical Feminists espouse resonates with me. I wish it was not the situation with my daughter that made me realize that I would have liked to have been more involved in feminism all along.

There were so many gains that feminists made that I benefited from when I was in college in the 70’s and as a mother and wife in the 80’s that I took for granted. We had more abortion rights and easy access to Planned Parenthood centers. I got my first birth control free from Planned Parenthood. We had more access to free standing birthing centers and independent midwives in my community.

I do not remember so much focus on external body modification and pornification of women in our dress and hygiene. Or at least it seemed to pass me by. I was so out of it that I didn’t know what a bikini wax was or a landing strip. I do remember having a hard time finding appropriate girls dresses for my daughter that did not look too “sexy” for a young girl. Maybe I was just too busy with work and raising our kids to notice what was going on. I was never a girly girl and bought our kids pretty much the same kinds of toys whether they were boys or girls. I liked to give them toys they could create with rather than toy sets. And the cars and play kitchen was equally for the boys and girls. I was not political about it. It just seemed right.

I also had no idea what was going on with pornography online and had no awareness of how common it seemed to my male children. I made the unwarranted assumption that none of my children would condone pornography.

I sometimes think my head was in the sand and my daughter announcing she was trans forced me to pull my head out and to look around and see what is really happening in society and its effects on my children .

This whole experience has been an awakening in a way, not one I welcomed but an awakening nonetheless.

I feel the strength and emotion of all the women who respond to this blog as well as the support provided here.

I hope that we mothers and families that are dealing with or have dealt with the transition of a family member can find a way to organize and support each. I hope that we can also get our message out to the public that we are here – maybe an alternative
to PFLAG.

GallusMag, I too appreciate your allowing us to take up so much space in your blog. I appreciate your suggestions about how to get the word out. We do have some obstacles but it is encouraging to have had this online discussion here.

Gallus I have a question – after everything you saw and read about the transgendering of children – what do you think will happen in the future? Do you think that a chance that this madness will come to an end and if so how?

I recently had a shocking conversation with my 15 year old stepdaughter. Sex education in Alberta, Canada (probably the most religiously conservative province in the country) discusses puberty blockers as an acceptable and safe thing for kids. As someone that’s suffered years and years of endometriosis and had to fire more than one doctor to avoid GnRH agonist pushers, I was floored and nearly speechless. As I am explaining the side effects of GnRH agonists to my stepdaughter, her eyes are getting more and more saucer-like and she’s getting more emotionally agitated by the minute.

Then she asks me “How does a woman’s brain actually feel?” Ah, trust that sharp, sharp young female human to get to the heart of the matter. I told her the honest truth. “I have no idea. My brain is just human. It’s my hormones that are female.”

She hasn’t hit Peak Trans yet, but she’s thinking harder than the average adolescent. It’s a start.

[…] both the dominance of males and the subjugation of females, and all with a tidy profit made by what one commenter here called the “Gender Industrial Complex”. Transgender also acts as a release valve to siphon off […]

“I read a Twitter chat you did where you said the hardest part of being trans is not being able to have your own biological child. Why does that stand out now, even though you’re so young?

It’s really hard for me to look at that because with such an amazing mom, I always wanted to be the greatest mom ever. People say, “Oh, you can always adopt,” and I completely agree with that. I can adopt. But, like, I’ll never have that moment where she comes out of my vag and I can say, “That’s my baby.” But since my sister has my same DNA, I’m convincing her to carry the baby for me.

Oh, good! It can come out of her vag.

We’ll take my hubby’s sperm and throw it in there and fertilize it.”

At fourteen, he already expects his older sister to act as his handmaiden and speaks of her as if she’s merely a vessel for his future use. No male socialization there! And I suspect the sister as surrogate idea must have come from the parents, because, seriously, how many fourteen-year-olds think about surrogacy?